Steven Bartlett: Immortality is tantalizing close and you think it's possible within the laws of physics and biology.

Michio Kaku: Yeah. In fact, we know that there's a clock in our body called the tie that tracks how long we're going to live and there's something called talomeorase which stops the clock which means that we can live forever. That's the good news. But the bad news was we found out that cancer also uses tie and talomeorase to live forever. And so the question is can we apply that to humans without wakening up the cancers? But this is not science fiction. This is the future.

Steven Bartlett: And for 71 years, you've been studying physics and how science will shape human destiny. So how is life likely to be different in the future?

Michio Kaku: Well, decade by decade, we see the enormous progress that we humans have made. For example, we'll probably be on the moon, maybe Mars, and also the artificial intelligence will help us to cure cancer and many diseases. However, for the first time in human history, we have the potential of destroying ourselves with designer germs, nuclear weapons, perhaps artificial intelligence. Like this is a quantum computer. This is so powerful that even the CIA is worried about the fact that these could break into any known computer,

Steven Bartlett: including banks, even Bitcoin.

Michio Kaku: That's right. So, capitalism would vanish. Society would come to a halt.

Steven Bartlett: And what about humanoid robots?

Michio Kaku: I would look seriously at the possibility of merging with them so that we don't have a civil war. Realize that we're at the edge of a knife. You tilt it the wrong way and there's worlds war. You tilt it the other way and there's food and luxury for everyone. And it's up to us to decide which way the knife will go.

Steven Bartlett: Dr. Moaku, I've waited a long time to ask someone these questions. Where do you believe we came from? Do you think it's plausible that in fact we are living in a simulation? And then is there any evidence when we look out at the stars that there is non-human life out there?

Michio Kaku: Okay, so first of all,

Steven Bartlett: For anyone that isn't aware of you and your work and they're wondering whether they should listen to what you have to say today because they don't know your work and they've not gone through the the books and the interviews that you've done, how would you describe your experience?

Michio Kaku: I work in something called string theory which we think is the theory that eluded Einstein for the last 30 years of his life. The theory of everything. The theory that explains the big bang, the formation of stars, galaxy, formation of the earth, life. I'm a physicist working in the theory of everything.

Steven Bartlett: What is the theory of everything?

Michio Kaku: An equation perhaps no more than one inch long that will allow us to quote read the mind of God. These are Einstein's words. the theory of the big bang, the theory of creation itself, the theory of of everything.

Steven Bartlett: I want to explain this in terms that even the most sort of novice viewer could understand. The theory of everything is is an equation that explains everything.

Michio Kaku: Physics. No, no, no. Everything. Because from physics comes chemistry, comes chemistry, comes biology, and from that comes our universe.

Steven Bartlett: Is it things like gravity and space and time?

Michio Kaku: gravity, uh, light, the nuclear force. Uh, there are four fundamental forces of the universe. There's the gravitational force which keeps us here, the electromagnetic force which lights up our our world, and the two nuclear forces. We want a theory that explains all four.

Steven Bartlett: You know, when people watch your interviews and they read your books, what do you think is the fundamental question that they're typically seeking to answer?

Michio Kaku: What does it mean for me?

Steven Bartlett: What does what mean for me?

Michio Kaku: The physics of the future. That is we physicists create the future. We're the ones who understand what is possible, what is not possible, and what is plausible. How does that affect the average person?

Steven Bartlett: And there's an element of of all of us that's just trying to figure out how we got here, where our place is in the universe.

Michio Kaku: Yeah. If especially for people who are philosophical or religious, they want to know what does it all mean? I mean, where did I come from? Where's the universe going? They want to know the answer to the big questions, the question of meaning. And that's what we physicists do.

Steven Bartlett: And they want to know if we're alone in the universe.

Michio Kaku: Oh yeah, that too. That's a byproduct of what we do is look for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Steven Bartlett: You've been doing this for many, many decades now. You've been studying the nature of the universe and physics. Is there a fundamental misunderstanding that you're aware of that the average person still believes?

Michio Kaku: Yeah, people think that physics is for eggheheads, that it's just uh doing equations on a blackboard and totally divorced from the average person. They don't realize that everything about their life, about electricity, about magnetism, about the nuclear force, about industry, everything comes from physics. But the average person thinks that physics is for eggheheads. It's for equations you put on a blackboard in a cartoon. Nope. physics is everywhere.

Steven Bartlett: In the last couple of weeks, you've been asked to do lots of interviews because Trump has released the UFO files. Before we get into lots of other subjects and physics generally, probably start by just tackling this question head on. Do you think that we are alone in the universe?

Michio Kaku: No, we are not alone because a galaxy has 100 billion stars of which maybe 10% have planets that are earthlike or are similar to Earth. But the question is, can they visit us? A Saturn 5 rocket would take 70,000 years just to reach the nearest star. Hop, skip, and a jump. 70,000 years. So a civilization that could reach the earth would be hundreds thousands of years more advanced than us. So I'm a physicist. We look at that space warps. Is it possible that a flying saucer race could create a space warp so they can visit us?

Steven Bartlett: Space warp. Bending space. Is that possible?

Michio Kaku: Well, gravity bends space all the time. The question is, can you bend space enough so that you can go faster than the speed of light so you can visit the nearest star? That's a question mark. We physicists look at that, but we have no definite answer. But it's it's possible.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think those sightings are actually extraterrestrial life or do you think it's just uh people hallucinating and seeing I don't know light orbs and misunderstanding what they're looking at?

Michio Kaku: Well, there are three types of observations. Close encounters of the first kind is when you see something in the sky. First kind. Close encounters of the second kind is when you have something tangible, an engine, uh a body, a wreckage of a UAP. That's second kind. Close encounters of the third kind is when you actually encounter them and shake their hand. Now, where are we? We're at close encounters of the first kind where we see things floating in the sky, but we don't know what they are. We don't have anything tangible. Now, in science fiction, we've captured the flying saucer. We have the aliens in a case or so. That's the movies. We have yet to see an alien in in a laboratory. We have yet to see an alien ship. In other words, people say, "I saw something." Now, what does that mean? I'm a physicist. We go where the we go where the observation goes. And we have no observations to verify what you saw. Except, of course, sensationalists who say, "I've seen the bodies." Okay, show us.

Steven Bartlett: So, from that, I conclude that you don't believe alien life has arrived here on Earth.

Michio Kaku: I don't I I I'm open to the possibility. 95% of the sightings we can we can uh explain using the known laws of physics. 5% are either optical illusions or they are evidence of visitation. You can't rule it out. So, I'm open to the idea that maybe they're here. Now, President Trump has released the first mountain load of 160 uh encounters of alien technology, we think, but we haven't yet seen a close encounter of the second kind. When that happens, that's a game changer. When we have a piece of UFO hardware, that would that would nail it to the wall right there.

Steven Bartlett: There's the a narrative that the US government or generally governments around the world wouldn't want the people to know about aliens because they're not ready for it. Do do you buy that?

Michio Kaku: That's the traditional uh excuse for not revealing these things. But the other excuse is that it's a cover. It's a cover for the stealth bomber. It's a cover for the fact that the military does experiment with aerodynamically novel forms of transport. And so those are the reasons why the military keeps it a secret and actually lies about these things. But now the it's leaking out. Congress, the president of the United States, they're demanding these these u sightings to be declassified. So we physicists now are analyzing them to see whether or not they're really real or not.

Steven Bartlett: I also heard you telling um I think it was Joe Rogan, you were telling a story of one particular star that reduces in its intensity by 20%.

Michio Kaku: Yeah, there is a star that that oscillates. So, it drops by about 20%. So it's it's it's reducing its light output by 20%. Yeah. Which is very unusual. It's the only one we saw we've seen so far. One of several theories that a civilization that advanced would have tremendous energy needs. And the easiest way to get energy is by encircling the mother star with an envelope. And the envelope then would absorb most of the energy.

Steven Bartlett: Yeah. And that would explain why we see a 20% reduction in the light output.

Michio Kaku: No, they think that it's probably an orbiting an orbiting globe that eclipses the mother star. rather than envelops the mother star, it simply goes around the mother star and eclipses it. Um, so it'd be like a big ball that that circles the star extracting and that would cause a dip. It would cause a dip in the intensity of light.

Steven Bartlett: Why couldn't it just be a planet?

Michio Kaku: Planets are not that big. Planets are about about 1% like Jupiter is about 1% the size of the sun. So the sunlight would drop by about 1 or 2% if Jupiter goes in front of our sun.

Steven Bartlett: Where do you believe this universe came from? So, what is the big bang?

Michio Kaku: Well, the universe came from the big bang. The big bang is a cosmic explosion that took place around 14 or so billion years ago that uh created the expanding universe. We have evidence of this expansion that took place, you know, 14 or so billion years ago. We see the stars moving away from us. So, think of a big balloon. the big balloon with uh points of light on the balloon and the balloon is expanding and the stars are moving away from each other.

Steven Bartlett: Expanding into what?

Michio Kaku: Hyperspace. Uh well we live in a four-dimensional universe. Three dimensions of space, one dimension of time. We live in a in a four-dimensional universe. But in string theory, we believe that there are 11 dimensions altogether.

Steven Bartlett: String theory is something that you came up with. And what is string theory?

Michio Kaku: I came up with string field theory, which is one of the branches of string theory. String theory says that what is a proton? What is an electron? They're nothing but vibrations of a string. So from a distance, this looks like a point particle. From a distance, this is an electron. But if you could magnify that, we find out it's not really a point at all. It's really a vibrating string. And each vibration corresponds to a node. So this would be a proton. This would be an electron. This would be a neutron. This would be a neutrino. That's why we have so many subatomic particles.

Steven Bartlett: Okay. So to to simplify this in a way that I understand, you're saying that at the very base layer, particles are the same, but they're just strings that are basically vibrating differently.

Michio Kaku: That's right. Everything is basically a vibrating string. So when the string vibrates in this direction, we call it an electron. If it vibrates in this way, we call it a proton. So, why do we have so many subatomic particles? How many of them are there? Hundreds. We've seen hundreds of subatomic particles. Well, it's really just one string. One string that can vibrate in different modes. Each mode is called a particle.

Michio Kaku: now we realize that there's another octave there's another layer even beyond what we see with the large hron collider. dark matter is invisible matter that surrounds the Milky Way galaxy and we don't know what it is there's a Nobel Prize waiting for somebody who could figure about what dark matter is. It's invisible matter. Invisible matter that surrounds the entire Milky Way galaxy. We think that we cannot yet prove that it's nothing but the next octave.

Steven Bartlett: What do you mean by octave?

Michio Kaku: Vibration. In other words, this would be the lowest vibration which is corresponds to an electron. But their other vibration is much bigger and they they would correspond to a higher octave. Well, this a guess. But it turns out that when you do the math and you look at the vibration of a string and you look at the higher vibrations, some of them are invisible. In other words, they don't interact with light. And so, we think that's what dark matter is.

Steven Bartlett: I mean it begs the question what caused the big bang.

Michio Kaku: Well we don't know but there are theories. String theory is a theory even before the big bang. It's a theory of everything. The big bang in some sense is a misnomer because it disguise the fact that we're ignorant. We're ignorant of what caused the thing to bang. String theory, there was no bang. That is it did collapse. If you go backwards in time, it did collapse with a very small thing and then came out again. It bounced. So, we think that there could be a bubble bath of universes. Our universe is a bubble of some sort and the bubble is expanding and that's called the big bang theory which fits all the data. But we think there are other bubbles out there. In other words, string theory says that we live not just in a four-dimensional world but in a 11dimensional world. These other dimensions we cannot see but we think that the universe coexists with other universes. There's a bubble bath.

Steven Bartlett: Why is it that planets are going around the sun like that?

Michio Kaku: It's because the sun is warping the space around it. Is creating a shallow depression. Space is not flat. This is Einstein's achievement. You go in this direction, seems flat. You go in this direction, everything seems to be flat, right? But no, the earth for example is round, but it looks flat, but it's not. The universe looks flat, but it's not. It's curved. And that's why planets go around the mother star because gravity is the byproduct of the warping of space. Einstein says that the reason why the earth is pulling us in is because the earth warps the space around us and is pushing us into the floor.

Michio Kaku: If this star becomes so massive that its gravity is so great that it pulls the entire shebang in like this. And then that would be a black hole. And we now believe that at the center of almost every galaxy we see, and there are trillions of galaxies, we think that at the center of these galaxies, there's a black hole. Even our galaxy, right? If you look at the direction of Sagittarius, the constellation Sagittarius, there's a black hole there.

Steven Bartlett: Am I right in thinking black holes they are extremely dense like areas of matter and they if you were to go near one everything that goes near it gets sucked in.

Michio Kaku: That's right. And you never get out again. If this is a a black hole, there is a ring or a sphere surrounding it. A point of no return. You go towards the black hole and you pass this this ring and then you go into the black hole never to be seen again. That's why if you fall through the event horizon of a black hole, you never come out because otherwise you would have to go faster than the speed of light, which is not possible.

Steven Bartlett: What's in there?

Michio Kaku: If you knew, you'd win a Nobel Prize. If I were to take a guess, I would say that it's an entrance. It's a gateway perhaps to another universe. We think for example if I have a warp space and you fall into warp space if if the warp space is powerful enough it may come out again on the other side. You need a shortcut and that's uh that's the gateway called a wormhole which is very similar to a black hole.

Steven Bartlett: What about simulation theory? Do you think it's plausible that in fact we are living in a simulation?

Michio Kaku: I would say the answer is probably no. Simulation theory is basically saying that the universe is a puppet show and there's a script. We're we're living out the script because somebody is pulling our strings. First of all, that violates quantum theory. Quantum theory believes in probabilities. We can calculate the probabilities of atomic events, chemical events with accuracy that is incredible. But simulation theory is not one of them.

Steven Bartlett: Do you think what we're seeing is real? couse people do psychedelic drugs and I hear about things like DMT. You inhale a little bit of smoke and suddenly everything you see is different. if our perceived reality is that fragile where we inhale one of smoke and suddenly we're amongst a different life form, then it makes us question whether this is real at all.

Michio Kaku: Well, I think the answer to that is that what you consider to be reality is really a partial fiction that your senses are limited by what your senses can retrieve from the outside world. But it's only a teeny weeny little fraction of what actually exists. Look at the electromagnetic spectrum of light for example. You can't see all the ultraviolet radiation, the infrared, x-rays. This room is full of realities that you can't see. So, what I'm trying to tell you is that you live in an illusion. It's a good illusion for survival. But in terms of being able to see the full spectrum of reality as it exists, no.

Steven Bartlett: What do you think of the um human sort of proclivity to imagine a god and to assign meaning and morality to that god. As humans, we want that.

Michio Kaku: Yes. And I think there's a reason for that. And the answer is evolution. What holds animals together? The alpha male, the top dog. As humans became more intelligent over millions of years, humans bicker, we argue, we challenge the leader and then tribes would fall apart because you need some glue. You need some glue to hold it together. So what happens is one person comes up and says, I'm stronger than you. and I talk to somebody even stronger than me, God. God is a glue. God is a glue that holds sensient beings together when there's no reason to hold them together anymore and they bicker and they the tribe falls apart. I think religion has a definite purpose. The purpose of religion is a glue to hold sensient, intelligent beings together.

Steven Bartlett: H are you concerned about AI at all?

Michio Kaku: I'm concerned about AI in the larger perspective that one day they can learn to do things that are bad, learn to kill, learn to maim to harm people. Realize that every invention that we've made in the past like the bow and arrow could be used for good and bad. Any new invention has a double-edged sword to it. And so, I think that so far most of the applications of artificial intelligence have been positive. We're talking about labor costs. We're talking about creating wealth. but you can also create artificial intelligent weapons as well. And the battlefield is where it's happening.

Steven Bartlett: And I mean some people even think that human life won't be the dominant form of intelligence in such a world. What do you think?

Michio Kaku: My personal attitude is that we should eventually merge with them.

Steven Bartlett: Merge with the robots.

Michio Kaku: That's right. That's my personal feeling because people talk about whether they're good, whether they're bad. so on and so forth. Well, the bottom line is they're going to become more powerful. And not now, but who knows, maybe in the next century, they'll begin to make reasonable choices. They'll reason. And at that point, they could be potentially dangerous. So, what do we do? Either we become super powerful and meet the challenge or we merge with them.

Steven Bartlett: When you say merge with them, what do you mean?

Michio Kaku: Become like that. become part robotic oursel, become superhuman. In other words, we are still looking the same except we have superhuman abilities and our brain is connected either directly or by remote control to a central nervous system that does the calculations and performs these calculations much better than we can and um we become superhuman.

Steven Bartlett: Okay. Thank you so much, doctor. I appreciate your time today. And I've learned so much about all of these fascinating things. And I realize how little we know.

Michio Kaku: Okay. Well, thank you.